"Fritz Leiber - The Green Millennium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

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 The Green Millennium




PHILGISHwoke up feeling as good as if all his previous life had happened to two other guys — poor,
miserable clunks!

Usually his whip-cracking reflexes had him out of bed in a flash and jerking on his shorts and sockasins
while he frantically hunted around for the jar of beard-dissolving cream. But this time he was able to
outsmart all tyrannous nerve-impulses and keep his eyes closed in order to enjoy the unprecedented
sensation all to himself, not even sharing it with the advertisement-covered walls of his tiny bachelor
apartment.

Why, it was simply wonderful, he decided after a bit. Outrageously, impossibly wonderful!

He actually felt as if this were not a world in which hot and cold wars had been gushing unpredictably
for fifty years like temperamental faucets, in which the Federal Bureau of Loyalty and Fun Incorporated
ruled the U.S.A. in the name of that drunken, hymn-singing farmer, President Robert T. Barnes, and in
which (according to the Kremlin Newsmoon, located on an earth-circling satellite vehicle) a new plan
was being considered for exchanging the descendants of prisoners taken in the half-century-old Korean
War.

And as if he, Phil Gish, weren’t a luck-forsaken little guy who on waking at eight o’clock this morning
hadn’t taken four sleeping pills in order to kill the day and temporarily forget that he had just lost
another job to a robot who did it five times as fast and twice as accurately, and that he’d had a blow-up
because of it and been coldly advised to see a psychiatrist.

He took a long, luxurious breath. Even the air smelt and felt different, as if dusted with some golden
chemical that banished care.

He opened his eyes and looked down at his pale chest with the two lone hairs that were a sardonic last
farewell from glorious jungle ape-hood. But this time the word that came to him was “slim,” not
“scrawny.” He rather liked his body, he decided — a neat and compact, if not exactly outsize, bit of
tissue. He yawned, stretched, scratched where the two hairs were, and looked around. The green cat sat
on the sill of the large open circular window, smiling at him.

“Hey, am I dreaming?”

The sound of his own voice, with its hint of a morning croak, answered that question.

Or have I really blasted off from behind the hair line?The second question, thought not spoken, was
quickly suppressed. He felt too good to let it worry him. If this was insanity, then three cheers for
paranoia!

Besides, there were all sorts of natural explanations of the cat’s somewhat unconventional color. Just